had kneed him in the balls. If this bloke had any ideas Johnny was prepared. But somehow he didn’t give off that kind of feeling.
Mr Golightly’s employees could have told Johnny that to pry undiscovered was a lost cause. The boss had supersubtle powers of observation. It was said that their business rival had once, long ago, worked for him and got himself sacked that way; on the other hand, there were rumours they had fallen out over some woman. Those who knew the boss felt that this last was unlikely – certainly the idea of some inexcusable interference fitted the picture better. When Martha had once, quite innocently, moved some of his archaeological specimens to give them a thorough clean, she had received a dressing down which had led to bad feeling for several weeks. Since then, the boss had tidied his own desk, which, as Martha said, behind his back, meant those nasty old stones, dating back from God knew when, merely gathered more and more dust, which was murder for her asthma.
Mr Golightly, having seen Sam off, looked in the direction of the stairs. If he sensed Johnny’s investigations – and it would be hard to see how he could – he must have decided not to mention it since he merely said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you, before you go?’
The idea of leaving made Johnny’s stomach lurch, like when his mum had gone in for her operation and he’d had to sleep on the sofa over at his Auntie Jean’s. Not that Jean was really his ‘auntie’: she was his mum’s friend from when he was a kid and he and his mum and Auntie Jean lived together over Plymouth way. That time, when his mum was in the hospital, Uncle Glenn, his Auntie Jean’s live-in boyfriend, had driven Johnny in his convertible to see her.
‘Can I have a go in your car?’
Mr Golightly inwardly sighed. What about his writing schedule? But the boy’s hazel eyes looked at him with frank beseechment.
A dart of pain touched Mr Golightly in the upper quarter of his left ribcage. Subduing irritation, he said, ‘Well, we can’t go far but…maybe you could direct me to the nearest place for decent shopping?’
That was easy. Oakburton was three miles down the road and full of all the supermarkets and wine stores anyone could desire. Under Johnny’s guidance, they reached Oakburton in remarkable time, given the age of the Traveller, and soon Johnny was guiding his new acquaintance round Somerfields.
Not that any of the foodstuffs seemed to have had much to do with fields, or with summer, Mr Golightly observed to himself. He bought a plastic bag of seedy-looking potatoes, some tins of tomatoes on special offer (four for the price of three), lavatory paper, kitchen roll, and a kitchen cleanser called Mr Muscle, a name which took his fancy. When they got to the till Johnny, who had been dragging round behind, surprised him.
‘Seven pound ninety-four.’
‘Seven ninety-four,’ the cashier, with bored inattention, repeated a second later.
Mr Golightly forked out a ten-pound note and they went next door to the Oak Deli. Johnny wandered off, leaving Mr Golightly to buy a brie, some slices of garlic sausage, olive oil, wine vinegar and some stuffed olives. These delicacies in hand, he looked for the small hardware store which, painted in a green gloss, had caught his eye as they drove into the town.
‘Paint’, ‘Timber’, Glass’, ‘Keys’ promised one window, while its twin announced, ‘Gas’, ‘Houseware’, ‘Plumbing’, ‘Fancies’.
Mr Golightly was taken by the idea of ‘Fancies’. He liked the look of this shop and entering felt at once at home among the curious collection of bric-a-brac. Here were dyes, bath plugs, colanders, tea cosies, flour sieves, screws and hooks and brass bolts of all sizes, slug pellets, hot-water bottles, jam covers, lemon squeezers, thermos flasks and hurricane lanterns. In particular there was a milk jug in the likeness of a cow. Mr Golightly lingered a little over the cow but in the end he bought a hot-water bottle with a knitted cover, some clothes pegs, shaped like little wooden people with stiff legs, some electric plugs and a packet of firelighters.
The door of the shop was fitted with an old-fashioned bell which raucously announced the arrival of Johnny. Mr Golightly pointed out the cow. ‘Me mum would like that,’ Johnny observed. ‘Eight pound forty-nine,’ he said, before the elderly man at the till had had time to ring up the items.
‘How did you work that out?’ Mr Golightly asked.
‘Did it in me head.’
‘Did you now,’ said Mr Golightly. He had heard about savage child geniuses and hoped to goodness he hadn’t got one on his hands.
SAM NOBLE HAD BEEN DISAPPOINTED THAT HIS brief conversation with the tenant at Spring Cottage had offered no purchase for the story of the Palme d’Or. The residents of Great Calne had all heard about it – many several times.
The opportunities to repeat the account of his brush with success had diminished over the five years since Sam had moved from London to the village after his divorce from Irene. Sam sometimes regretted parting from Irene. At the time the world had presented itself as his oyster. The separation had occurred after the near miss at Cannes and had been speeded on its way by a temporary association with an air hostess from Malta. But the oyster seemed to have clammed up since, and such pearls as may have been lying in wait remained ungarnered.
It was true that Irene had not been inspiring: she had wittered on, and long before the intervention of the air hostess Sam had ceased to pay her attention. But nowadays he sometimes missed her chattiness, her observations about the garden and whether they should use chemical pesticides on the patio moss, or go for something organic. There were times when he even missed her warm, comfortably ageing body in the bed beside him.
Sleeping alone in the double bed – which, since it had become available for legitimate double occupancy, had remained depressingly single – had eroded Sam’s confidence. He dreamed fitfully about naked women jockeys and woke in the mornings too early. Dr Rhys at the Oakburton surgery had even discussed Prozac with him but, in the end, Sam decided he preferred to go it alone without anything chemical. After all, he still had a brain – or liked to think he did!
Dr Rhys was young and handsome and believed in the Hippocratic oath. That, and his sympathetic manner, meant he got lumbered with all the psychological stuff. He had suggested that maybe Sam might like to ‘talk’ to somebody. But Sam feared the ‘somebody’ might mean the lady vicar, who was training as a counsellor. Everyone knew she had a bee in her bonnet about male sexual performance. She had alarmed George, who dug the graves and helped out down at Folly Farm with the lambing, during bereavement counselling by asking questions which were hardly decent when you thought that his wife of fifty years was barely cold in her grave. And the grave dug lovingly by her grieving husband’s own two hands too! But these days it was all live-in sex and what the lady vicar worryingly referred to as ‘seeing to yourself’, with precious little about the rites of holy matrimony.
Sam had no particular concerns about the Church of England’s attitude to sexual habits, or to anything else for that matter. He had lived most of his working life in Hampstead and was a confirmed social atheist. But he didn’t care to be asked about his morning erections, particularly not by a lady vicar. George, it was rumoured, had been encouraged to plot a graph.
In any case, it was not attentions of that kind he necessarily craved; it was intellectual stimulus. The empty early mornings had produced a new idea for a creative project – a film about sheep dog trials. According to Nicky Pope, this chap who’d moved into Spring Cottage was a writer. He would probably welcome a chance to hear about Sam’s contacts in the film trade.
Mr Golightly’s first day of writing had been a washout. The shopping excursion with Johnny had protracted into lunch. The cottage had been chilly on their return, and the boy, off his own bat, had read, and apparently comprehended, the instruction book for the wood-burning stove. A miracle, Mr Golightly couldn’t help thinking, and far more useful than some he had known. The impossible-looking diagrams had seemingly been clear as daylight